Pitchfork

The title track from Pinetop Seven's fourth album, The Night's Bloom, begins with a murky overture that sounds like it's playing through an old Victrola-- distant, subdued, aged and dusty. At the song's 0:37 mark, though, the strings swell, becoming fuller and more detailed, as if a black-and-white film has suddenly erupted into Technicolor brilliance. This moment, which is the first of many unexpected sonic hooks on the album, not only sets the tone for the dozen songs that follow, but also reintroduces Pinetop Seven after a five-year absence, serving as a tangible transition from 2000's subterranean-dark Bringing Home the Last Great Strike to the more varied sound of The Night's Bloom. In that half-decade interim, the band has grown from being Darren Richard's more-or-less solo project into a collaborative ensemble that has cut its teeth on small tours and ambitious new scores for old silent films like The Wind and Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Those exercises have proved instructive: The Night's Bloom should place the band alongside Iron & Wine and Calexico as the best of bewildering and beautiful Americana.

As if to live up to the sonic possibilities of the word "bloom," the album is much more ornate than previous efforts: songs are dense with instruments, which intermingle in surprising ways. On "Easy Company", Nate Walcott's muted trumpet and Richard's vibraphone slink around Mack Hagood's piercing slide guitar and Andy Rader's circling bassline, and the effect is eerily noir, bubbling with tension and possibility. Snapshot-size fanfares herald "Born Among the Born Again" and "A Mouthful of Expensive Teeth", echoed in Richard's iridescent backing vocals. Melissa Bach's string arrangements-- played by members of the Chicago-based Quartet Parapluie-- add to the widescreen scope of "Witness" and the private heartbreak of the mournful "Made a Whisper Out of Me". This arsenal of instruments permits more intricacy and versatility in the arrangements, which in turn bolster Richard's vocal melodies and expands the songs' emotions into a full spectrum of grief, anger, desire, disdain, and horror.

Still, despite the collaborative dynamic on The Night's Bloom (most of the string and horn arrangements are credited to cellist Bach and/or trumpet player Walcott), Pinetop Seven still feels like Richard's brainchild, with the music scoring soundtracks for the short films in his head. Setting his story-songs in the region Ray Bradbury once described as "the October Country" ("that country where it is always turning late in the year, that country whose people are always autumn people, thinking autumn thoughts"), Richard proves a confident storyteller who fully inhabits his hard-luck characters and knows precisely which details to disclose and which to withhold. His voice soars, but it does so solemnly, resonating with the intensity of a projector's arc light as he relates these black comedies of humiliation that evoke the tragedy of being someone else's fool. "June" (a cousin of "A Black Eye to Be Proud of" from Bringing Home the Last Great Strike) follows a couple on a fateful trek into the woods: I "won't tell you what we did," the narrator says, "don't know the word for it." But he has ominously ulterior motives: "They'll never look at me again that way." Sung in the voice of a love-starved outsider who just wants to show a sympathetic woman "what I'm capable of," "A Page From the Desert" is a murder ballad without the murder, and "Witness", with pop-song dee-dee-dee's illuminating its chorus, relates a story of petty revenge that builds to an ending worthy of Flannery O'Connor.

Distinguishing between the band's music and Richard's lyrics, however, seems largely beside the point. As with any good soundtrack, The Night's Bloom derives its power from the interaction between sound and story-- how the racing-heart conclusion of "His Aging Miss Idaho" embodies the precarious intensity of love; how the quiet strings and unsteady vocals reinforce the intimacy of "Made a Whisper Out of Me"; how the descending guitar triplets on "Fringe" mirror the whistled theme of "A Page from the Desert". All the elements intermingle with one another to put bloom on the night, and the result is perhaps the most evocative and sweeping realization yet of Pinetop Seven's particularly cinematic aesthetic.